So the time had finally come to shoot this thing, and I couldn’t be happier! Even though it was interesting to work on the pre-production and it was a real learning experience for me, the practical side is where I hit my stride and where I was finally able to give some back to the group. The creative writers in our group made it clear that they weren’t the most comfortable behind a camera or doing anything technical so the other media students and I made sure they knew what they were doing by the end of the day.

As you might have seen in the call sheet that I had put together we all took it in turn of being various things, depending on the number of crew we had at a time we would have a Director, AD, cinematographer, boom operator and light operator. By the end of the shoot we all had done at least one of each. I think this was the best way to do it because it allowed everyone to have a taste for each individual job and also allowed us media students to lead by example.

In regards to the actual shooting I think it went fairly well! we had a slight problem with an actor not showing up which we managed to overcome by having one of our own step in but besides that there were no major problems. I mentioned in a previous post that it would be interesting to see how I would go running with a call sheet instead of running on the fly: to be honest, I didn’t find it much of a help. It was good in the sense that we didn’t leave anything out because we new exactly what we needed to film and it made sure that we each gave everyone an equal turn which is fair in this context but when it comes to actually being in the industry you don’t swap around your jobs every hour. I guess it might have been the way that I wrote out the call sheet, I tended to block out hour lots where we could rehearse and film a specific genre but besides stating that every other decision was thought up right there and then, which is how I usually work. I feel, if I had the opportunity again, I would take one script and put it through the whole pre-production phase, doing things like making a shot list and drawing up a story board to create something very rigid that you have to stick to. unfortunately this was not the case and I never got that epiphany that I was hoping for, something to prove to me that it was worth doing so much planning. I guess the only thing that I found benefit in is organising the crew and cast to shoot around their other schedules of work and life, although you’d like to think that if they were in the industry and getting paid for it then you wouldn’t need to worry about that anyway.

Anyway, all in all it was a great day of shooting, I managed to bring some skills to the team which I may have been lacking in the pre-production stage, nifty tricks that I had learned from my other shoots, only things that you can really learn once you’ve been through them before, like using a swivel chair for a dolly shot.

Once we were all happy where the scripts were we then moved onto the next stage which was organising location. We had always kept location in the back of our heads when writing script so that we could envisage what the end product might look like. We knew we wanted to shoot at RMIT for several reasons: it was central for everyone to get to, we needed the setting of a uni (so what  better place to fit than a uni) and it meant that we could do a lot of specified location scouting to try and find the best possible place to shoot. We all tried to keep an eye out for possible locations during our time around the uni, we’d then take photos and report back to the group what we found and whether we could use it in our shoot. One such place that I found was an alleyway that I thought would be good for the horror genre, even though we didn’t use it, it was good to build up a catalogue of potential locations.

Here are some locations I found for the Horror Genre:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Building up a good catalogue of places around the uni is really helpful to map up how our shooting days might go. There were a lot of potential places however the problem that we’re finding is we need rather neutral spaces for our shoot as the location has to accomodate for different genres. In the pictures above they would’ve worked really well stylistically for horror but couldn’t accomodate for mockumentary or fairytale. So at the moment we’re thinking a classroom, or something that is enclosed so that we can control the mise-en-scene.

As Mentioned previously it was my job to look after editing all of the scripts and making sure the continuity was there between the difference episodes. Our original idea of sending all of the scripts to me and then me sending them all out separately didn’t quite work as there was a lot of explaining that had to go on to make sure that everyone understood where I was going with it. There were also a few times where I originally had hoped to change a certain occurrence in the script only to be told by the writer that it couldn’t be changed as it was crucial to the whole story and what they planned to film, so I had to make even more changes to other peoples script and all in all it was a bit of a mess.

At our next meeting we addressed this quite simply, it wasn’t working, what can we do to fix it and make sure that everyone was on the same page. We all decided, in the end, that it was far better for me to write down, what we called, a major story arc and everyone work off that piece of writing, rather than me trying to work off several pieces of writing. Our major story arc contains all of the common occurrences and meetings between the different characters and at what time in the story they occur. It was my job to create this major story arc as I had the best idea as to where everyone was heading thanks to my previous attempts to make things work. It was really simple, I only did dot points of what needed to happen and I tried not to over complicate things so that everyone could follow along easily enough. Then everyone was sent off to work on the scripts again but this time everyone would be basing it on this single piece of writing, which in the end gave all the scripts a nice uniformity to them and kept the continuity peeps at bay.

It was definitely a struggle for me at first trying to get all the scripts to work together because I’d never written many scripts let alone conduct a multi-writer marathon! It was good to collaborate with everyone and really interesting to see different styles of writing and how people were trying to convey their genre within their writing. I think for me, if I was trying to write a script in a certain genre I think the easiest thing to do would be to explicitly say it at the start of the script, because if there’s one thing I’ve learnt from this editing experience, sometimes the simple solutions are the best!

Here is the Major Story arc that I got people to work off of:

As I mentioned in a previous post, I thought the idea of a script editor was something we should look into. My original idea was to have everyone write a script and then we’d swap them all around and edit them so that it was fair. The only problem is I thought it might not be too beneficial to the story as it would take a lot of swapping around scripts to ensure they all connect together well enough (like we planned in our original concept). With this in mind I then proposed to the group that perhaps I should become the sole script editor, I wouldn’t write a script but I would read and edit the scripts that everyone else had created, making sure that they would all fit together nicely. The group agreed and so this became my new job title in the pre-production phase.

Once the first drafts of the scripts were written up they were sent to me and I got to work. I read over them several times trying to get the main themes of each individual story, although similar there were things which didn’t quite add up when looking at them in unison. For instance there was an alliance that had to be formed between two characters, an unlikely alliance because they despised each other. In the Noir genre the alliance took place at the party; however, in the rockumentary that alliance takes place the day after. It was just little things like that which I had to look out for. When I did find something that needed to be fixed I scribbled some notes on the side of the script addressed to the writer explaining what changes needed to be made, that way they could re-write it and it would still be coming from the same voice.

Here are some examples:

It was really refreshing to listen to what everyone else in the class was doing for their Project. There is a real diversity which was nice to see, it seemed that genre was a key concept in a few group projects but others tackled ideas like specifically pre-production elements or character development.

One idea that I picked up from another group was having an editor for the script writing, someone who would go through the script, edit in and out different things, making sure the flow was there, having a more technical perspective to that of the main writer. I really like this idea and think implementing that into our plan would be beneficial. As I have figured out in this course, the more pre-production you do the better and faster you can work through the actual production, which in a time critical project like this is a big help.

At the moment we are all writing a separate script for each character, once we have done that, if we simply pass it to the left around a circle and the all edited one, marking up certain things adding notes, checking the flow of dialogue it might help refine some of the rougher points in each episode. It would also help us to take a step back from the project and analyse it from a distance.

Another idea that was proposed was to broaden the differences in the way that one goes about creating media. There is the classic Write, Shoot, Edit sequence that we are all going to be using in our project however some suggest that it would be interesting to change up the sequence. One might begin with shooting and then come back to the writing afterwards to piece everything together. Others might write and shoot at the same time. The problem with this is it might be a more disruptive work flow and may take a lot longer to shoot, which could be a major downfall in our tight schedule, especially seeing as we are working with Actors who are generously giving up their own time to come and work with us. But an interesting concept nonetheless.

A similar idea was brought up in the group meeting we had on Monday with our teacher. From this the idea is being tossed around that the Mockumentary genre should actually be filmed parallel to the filming of the other genres. I personally like this idea because it would easily give it the right stylistic elements, have a kind of behind the scene feel with the shaky cam and darting in and out of different locations fairly quickly. Then we’d film the interview segments at a later stage like a reality TV show like Master-chief or the likes do. This would change things up because then a script would be unnecessary for this character, taking snippets of dialogue from other scripts (the only thing that would need scripting would be the interviews to camera).

A few interesting ideas that are worth bringing up in the next meeting we have.

 

For those who did not have the fortune of seeing our live presentation here are the slides.

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1nl2Sv3JhhR2EdMWwuskxZ2gNM1rl410sOXnJ7S5E93E/edit#slide=id.p

I think that the receptions was really positive from our other class mates. They seemed to like the idea of exploring genre through different points of view and the whole story arc. I think the main concern was what we could produce in the small timeframe we have compared to the the giant task that filming the 6 part series would be. Because this was still under debate within the group it was hard to answer the question as a matter of fact, instead giving a few options that we’ve been toying with: either filming a series of scenes that we can then juxtapose together or create a short trailer. Although similar each have different qualities that could effect the experiment in very different ways.

In terms of what I noticed during giving the presentations: I’ve come to realise that context is going to be everything when it comes to actually creating the content. I came to notice this after watching the reactions of the different videos that we played for the different characters. All of the videos had people laughing, which is good because it was entertaining, however some of the genres that we want to explore aren’t necessarily meant to be making people laugh.

For example the Horror Genre with its character Vincent got a lot of laughs due to what he was saying, and I also found it amusing in this context. There are a few factors that would’ve contributed to this reaction, the biggest being the way that it was presented. Looking like an online dating profile isn’t exactly the scariest thing; this is obviously an easy fix when we get to filming it, because we will have a much more dynamic way of filming, not straight face to camera. Other contributing factors may have been that everyone knew who was acting, the setting of the presentation and the videos that had come before it.

Most of these aren’t a problem and will be ironed out fairly easily when it comes to filming the actual final product. The one that i’m most concerned about is the videos before it creating certain expectations for the audience, in this case to laugh. Different genres should be evoking different types of emotion from their audience if we are looking at them in their true form. This could become problematic for a few reasons. The first being even though we are working on characters separately they’re a part of the same story arc, which may connect the audience to certain motifs identified in other genres, so we’ll need to try and keep those separate from genre to genre. The second being trying to change the audience expectations halfway through a series.

Obviously this doesn’t matter too much for when we deliver the project but if we were looking at creating the full piece then it may become a big problem.

Other than that it looks like we’ve gotten the approval from our fellow students to steam ahead with our idea.

In Preparation for the presentation we had a group meeting the week before during the holidays to cement our project idea and to divide up the talking up. We decided that seeing as everyone had their individual character that they had been working on it would make sense for everyone to introduce their own characters. Early on in the discussion someone made the suggestion to make a little introduction video of that character, as a kind of, online dating profile. So it was up to me to introduce the characters as I didn’t have designated character. My job was pretty simple, seeing as we had a multitude of writing from our group meeting it was almost a case of copying and pasting the idea from that. My main problem was that I had to keep it all short and concise because we had 5 minutes worth of video that we had to get through in a ten minute presentation.

Because some of the characters didn’t match the gender of their writer I was asked to step in and do some acting as the Stoner/Class clown in the Teen comedy genre. Niamh, who was writing the short script for me, sent through a draft of what she’d like me to say in the video. From there I was able to figure what kind of character she wanted. Niamh gave me some creative freedom with this, she said I was free to throw in a bit of improv in if I liked so I put in a reference to finding Nemo and tried to make it seem as natural as possible.

Here is the video that I did to introduce the Stoner character in our group project.

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B3atcmZODt1UWHdjMmcxd3hIcEk

I think it was definitely a big help being a part of the creative team to really understand exactly what Kind of Character Niamh wanted. Being in the meetings and knowing exactly how he fit into the big picture, what he needed to be like, everything thing that wasn’t necessarily in the script that I was reading off helped me out tremendously on delivering the final cut. The problem with this revelation is how to convey that type of understanding of the character to an actor that hasn’t been there during the development stage of the project. For instance when the stoner is explaining his nickname he gestures with his hand which reveal a lighter and a jay. This wasn’t in the script but is the type of comedy that we’d like to implement in the character, so we’ll need to figure out how we can convey those types of actions that make the character. I’m thinking perhaps a separate character briefing that we can give to the actor so that they know some background to the character that isn’t found in the script.

Whilst working on this group project it seemed hard to string all the ideas into one cohesive story. Once I thought we were all on the same page but then, after we kept talking, we still had very different ideas of how the project would go down. This was the hardest when we were trying to come up with the story arcs and relationships between the 5 character in order to create some conflict. In my original concept pitch I brought in the idea of 5 characters and a love triangle type idea that connected all the characters together with their separate traits. Since the original pitch some of the characters have changed but the concept would still work. So after two weeks of running through different ideas and playing with different concepts I suggested that we should try again with this Love triangle type idea, only this time, I had a secret weapon! A white board!

Being able to draw out the character relationships on the white board helped me explain the general idea to the rest of the group members on how each relationship would work. Who loves who and who hates who. After we had the skeletal structure that I had conceptualised then the group immediately understood where I was going with it and we all set out to fleshing the characters relationships out. Soon everyone was putting ideas on the board. This diagram definitely helped get everyone on to the same page and I think that it made life so much easier being able to see the relationship lines visibly.

Important lesson learned: when working on a group project, seek visual aids to help explain your concepts.

This was the board at the end of the day, once we had all worked on it together. It is fair to say that at the end of the day we were all really excited, seeing the potential for our project project.

This picture was then created digitally so that we could all keep on the same page as to any changes that we might need to make in the future.